Codex Vindobonensis I - color facsimile, ed. & with brief notes by Otto Adelhofer. Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, Graz, Austria, 1963.

C.A. Burland, "More on Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I." Katunob #5, Colorado State College, Greeley, 1966.

Alfonso Caso, "Explicacion del Reverso del Codex Vindobonensis." Memoria del Colegio Nacional, vol. 5, #5, Mexico City, 1951.

José Corona Nuñez, "Explicacion del Codice Vindobonensis." Antiguedades de México, vol. 4, Secreteria de Hacienda y Crédito Publico, Mexico City, 1967.

Francisco Lopez de Gomara, Cortés, trans. Lesley Byrd Simpson. University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1964.

Karl Anton Nowotny, Tlacuilolli. Ibero-Amerikanische Bibliotek, Monumenta Americana, 3, Berlin, 1961.

Donald Robertson, Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1961.

Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, The Florentine Codex, C. Dibble & J.O. Anderson, ed. & trans. School of American Research, Santa Fe & University of Utah, 11 vols., 1950-1969.

Mary Elizabeth Smith, Picture Writing from Ancient Southern Mexico: Mixtec Place Signs and Maps. University of Oklahoma Press. Norman, 1973.

The Akademische Druck facsimilies of Meso-American pictorial manuscripts (distributed in the U.S. by the Current Co.) are generally considered the best available at the present time ¾ but they are expensive: their edition of Codex Vindobonensis had a retail price of $385.40 when I wrote this essay in 1982. If you have access to a good academic library, you might want to check out their special collections department for copies of these facsimiles. You might also for the Sociedad Mexicana de Antropologia facsimiles of codices Bodley, Colombino, and Selden, which were published along with superb commentaries by Alfonso Caso. The only inexpensive facsimile of a pre-Conquest manuscript currently available is the Dover edition of Codex Nuttall ($11.95, paper). This book, which has an excellent introduction by Arthur G. Miller, is actually a turn-of-the-century facsimile. Given the limitations of turn-of-the-century stone lithography, this is an excellent facsimile - but it pales in comparison to the Akademische Druck editions. Compare the details reproduced in John Paddock's Ancient Oaxaca (Stanford University Press, 1966) with the corresponding passages in the Dover edition. Paddock's book, by the way, includes a color reproduction of page 1 of Vindobonensis, and can give you a sense of how the first of the three pages presented here looks in color, if the Akademische Druck edition is unavailable to you. The initial chapters of Smith's Picture Writing provide a good introductory summary of conventions used in the pictorial manuscripts, followed by a detailed study of place signs and maps. There are brief comments on several pages of Vindobonensis in the relatively easy to find Image of the New World by Gordon Brotherston (Thames & Hudson, 1979) and The Wondrous Mushroom by R. Gordon Wasson (McGraw, 1980). A good place to start studying the manuscripts is provided by two comprehensive bibliographies, Ignacio Bernal's Bibliografia de Arqueologia y Etnografia and Howard F. Cline's Guides to Ethnohistorical Sources, volumes 14 & 15 of Handbook of Middle American Indians.

For a completely different reading, see Jill Leslie Furst's Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I: A Commentary (Institute for Mesoamerican studies; State University of New York at Albany). Although Furst didn't convert me, her commentary is essential to future study of the codex.

Since I wrote these notes, Dover has published an excellent and inexpensive facsimile of Codex Borgia. Perhaps this will act as a forerunner of other affordable facsimiles, and a greater interest in and appreciation of the Mexican manuscripts.